Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Jan-Dec:23:2331216519858311.
doi: 10.1177/2331216519858311.

Spatial Speech-in-Noise Performance in Bimodal and Single-Sided Deaf Cochlear Implant Users

Ben Williges  1 , Thomas Wesarg  2 , Lorenz Jung  2 , Leontien I Geven  3 , Andreas Radeloff  3 , Tim Jürgens  1   4
Affiliations

Spatial Speech-in-Noise Performance in Bimodal and Single-Sided Deaf Cochlear Implant Users

Ben Williges et al. Trends Hear. 2019 Jan-Dec.

Abstract

This study compared spatial speech-in-noise performance in two cochlear implant (CI) patient groups: bimodal listeners, who use a hearing aid contralaterally to support their impaired acoustic hearing, and listeners with contralateral normal hearing, i.e., who were single-sided deaf before implantation. Using a laboratory setting that controls for head movements and that simulates spatial acoustic scenes, speech reception thresholds were measured for frontal speech-in-stationary noise from the front, the left, or the right side. Spatial release from masking (SRM) was then extracted from speech reception thresholds for monaural and binaural listening. SRM was found to be significantly lower in bimodal CI than in CI single-sided deaf listeners. Within each listener group, the SRM extracted from monaural listening did not differ from the SRM extracted from binaural listening. In contrast, a normal-hearing control group showed a significant improvement in SRM when using two ears in comparison to one. Neither CI group showed a binaural summation effect; that is, their performance was not improved by using two devices instead of the best monaural device in each spatial scenario. The results confirm a "listening with the better ear" strategy in the two CI patient groups, where patients benefited from using two ears/devices instead of one by selectively attending to the better one. Which one is the better ear, however, depends on the spatial scenario and on the individual configuration of hearing loss.

Keywords: bimodal; cochlear implant; single-sided deafness; spatial hearing.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Individual pure-tone (air-conduction) hearing thresholds for the ear contralateral to the CI of the bimodal CI group (blue) and the CI SSD group (pink). For the three steeply sloping hearing losses in the lower left of the graph, no threshold (up to 120 dB HL) was measurable for higher frequencies.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Flowchart of the measurement setup used for assessing speech intelligibility in noise in a controlled acoustic environment. CI = cochlear implant; MHA = master HA; HA = hearing aid; OISa = Oldenburg sentence test; HRIR = head-related-impulse response; BTE = behind-the-ear.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
SRT50% boxplots for the bimodal CI, CI SSD, and NH listeners. Head symbols denote listening mode (monaural or binaural, specified by the text on each side: CI = cochlear implant, HA = hearing aid, NH = normal hearing). For each listening mode, three different spatial scenarios were tested, as displayed on the abscissa: noise from −90°, 0°, and 90°. SSD = single-sided deaf; SRT = speech reception threshold.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Individually calculated SRM from SRT50% displayed as boxplots for the bimodal CI and CI SSD patient groups and for the NH listeners, for the left ear, the right ear, and both ears, according to the head symbols. CI = cochlear implant; HA = hearing aid; NH = normal hearing; SRM = spatial release from masking; SSD = single-sided deaf.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Individually extracted binaural summation from SRT50% for the bimodal CI and CI SSD patient groups and for the NH control group. In each group, the binaural summation was calculated for each noise direction. CI = cochlear implant; NH = normal hearing; SSD = single-sided deaf.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Akeroyd M. A., Arlinger S., Bentler R. A., Boothroyd A., Dillier N., Dreschler W. A., Kollmeier B. (2015) International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) recommendations for the construction of multilingual speech tests: ICRA Working Group on Multilingual Speech Tests. International Journal of Audiology 54(Suppl 2): 17-2doi:10.3109/14992027.2015.1030513. - PubMed
    1. Armstrong M., Pegg P., James C., Blamey P. (1997) Speech perception in noise with implant and hearing aid. The American Journal of Otology 18(6 Suppl): S140–S141. - PubMed
    1. Arndt S., Aschendorff A., Laszig R., Beck R., Schild C., Kroeger S., Wesarg T. (2011) Comparison of pseudobinaural hearing to real binaural hearing rehabilitation after cochlear implantation in patients with unilateral deafness and tinnitus. Otology & Neurotology 32(1): 39–47. doi:10.1097/MAO.0b013e3181fcf271. - PubMed
    1. Arndt S., Laszig R., Aschendorff A., Hassepass F., Beck R., Wesarg T. (2017) Cochlear implant treatment of patients with single-sided deafness or asymmetric hearing loss. HNO 65(Suppl 2): 98–108. doi:10.1007/s00106-016-0297-5. - PubMed
    1. Bernstein J. G., Goupell M. J., Schuchman G. I., Rivera A. L., Brungart D. S. (2016) Having two ears facilitates the perceptual separation of concurrent talkers for bilateral and single-sided deaf cochlear implantees. Ear and Hearing 37(3): 289–302. doi:10.1097/AUD.0000000000000284. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types